


Battle of the Bands

by ddotmac



Category: Red vs. Blue, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:41:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23466319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ddotmac/pseuds/ddotmac
Summary: Jonathan Sims' rival, the infamous, otherwise nameless Locus, is the leader of the most popular band on college campus. But when a competition arises, that just might change.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims/Locus | Samuel Ortez
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	1. Chapter 1

It was the most cliche thing Jon had ever witnessed for himself. ‘Battle of the bands’ competitions only happened in movies, but there he was, standing in front of the poster, with the first and thus far only band listed in perfect cursive as Locus and the Grasshoppers. He frowned at it for so long he didn’t notice at first when somebody came up behind him. 

“Aren’t you on your way to comp?”

He jumped out of his skin and turned to see Basira, a worried expression on her face.

Jon stammered for a moment before exasperatedly gesturing at the poster. “Can you believe this?”

Basira rolled her eyes, grabbing Jon by the wrist and dragging him away from the corkboard. “You act as though this is a surprise. I wouldn’t bat an eye if they had some hand in the competition existing at all.”

“Well, why bother if they know they’d win?” Jon exploded, throwing out his arms. “Nobody else is even going to enter at this rate!”

Basira raised an eyebrow at him. “So you’re allowed to make decisions for the entire band now, are you?”

Jon blinked. “I.. surely you’re not serious.”

“Sure I am! Why not?” she said, having to continue walking so that Jon would follow her. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? We get a little more notoriety? Would playing to a bigger crowd at the cost of getting beaten by Locus really be the end of the world?” 

Jon grumbled to himself. “I just hate even looking at the son of a bitch.” He shoved his hands in his front pockets. “The thought of having to watch him traipse around on stage in that pretentious getup of his makes me feel sick.”

Basira shot him a look, and Jon glared back. “What? My thing is cool!”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night, Jon,” she said with a grin, patting the back of his hand gently. 

“He just takes the whole stage persona thing way too seriously!”

Basira sighed. “That I actually agree with you on.” She held the door open for him, continuing to ensure that he made it to class. “How do you figure he’s even managed to keep his real name a secret for so long?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t  _ care,” _ Jon drawled, squinting at the mental image of Locus that he couldn’t shake. “It’s pretentious and stupid and so’s he.” 

Basira shrugged in response. “At least talk to the others before deciding we don’t have a chance?” she asked at last. When he didn’t respond, she went on, “It could be fun!” His back remained to her and he sighed. “I know this is a hard concept for you to grasp, but there are those of us that do things for the sake of enjoying them.”

“I will think about it,” he said on a long breath, and walked the rest of the way to his class.

* * *

“Hey hey, it’s Jon, looking kinda sad!” Tim chirped as Jon walked into their dorm. “What’s wrong?”

Jon flopped down on the sofa and ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s just this bloody battle of the bands thing. Have you heard about it?”

“Uhh.. a little.”

“It’s just-- it’s just that fucking  _ Locus _ is already going to be there!” He shot a sidelong glance at Tim, almost apologetic. “No offense.” 

Tim shrugged. “I mean, it’s not like we’re  _ friends.  _ I just know him.” He leaned back into the couch, snuggling into the cushion. “Haven’t fucked him yet, but with any luck, that’s subject to change.”

Jon raised his eyebrows mockingly. “Bending the entire team over the locker room benches one by one, are we?”

“Slowly but surely.”

“Jesus, Tim! I was joking!”

Tim burst into laughter as Jon slapped his leg. “Wouldn’t that just make me a big name, though? Getting Locus on his knees?”

“If I wanted to hear about your exploits, I’d work for the newspaper.” Jon shoved a hand over his mouth, clamping his fingers together to prevent Tim’s tongue from poking out through them. Luckily, he opted to peel Jon’s hand away with his own. 

“I don’t like that word,” Tim said. “It’s not an archaeological dig. I like ‘sexcapades’. Also, would you  _ not  _ fuck him?” When he saw the look on Jon’s face, he corrected, “Well, I guess you wouldn’t. But he’s hot, right?”

Jon blew a hair out of his face. “He’s stupid and awful and I don’t like him.”

“That’s not a no.”

He glared back at him and Tim snorted. “I mean, you’re not  _ not  _ doing the competition, are you?”

Jon opened his mouth to respond when Tim’s phone started ringing. The caller ID came up as ‘Locus’ with a football emoji next to it. Jon sneered down at it. “What was that about not being friends?”

“Shut up, we all have each other’s numbers,” he said, picking it up and setting both feet on the coffee table. “Hey, how’s it going?” Muffled speech from the other end of the phone. “Yeah, I can do that. Everything’s fine, right?” A longer pause. “Uh huh. Yeah-- on Saturday, yeah. Of course.” His eyes widened and met Jon’s. “Um, I’m not sure you know him.” Then he smiled. “O-oh, right, I did say that, didn’t I. Well, um, I think he’s been seeing somebody.” Jon’s face burned. “Okay, maybe some other time. Okay. See ya.” He hung up and released a breath, looking at Jon apologetically.

“What,” Jon snapped before Tim could even open his mouth.

Tim grinned, nervous. “I might have been thinking about hooking the two of you up before I realized about the whole rivalry thing?”

Jon stammered and failed to think of a response, so he simply stood up and stamped to his room while Tim laughed. 

* * *

Sam was scrolling down the university’s Facebook page, admiring all the pictures of his smiling face, on sports headlines and local artist articles alike. 

“Hey, come back in here.”

“Just a second, Mace!” he called back, refreshing the page. 

A different voice this time. “We really, really need to nail this down, you know.”

Sam didn’t respond at all because of the photograph in front of him. Jon’s triumphant smirk, completely garbed up and in smeared makeup, pumping a fist in front of a cheering crowd in a pub. The headline read: _“Mechanisms to join local Battle of the Bands.”_

He chuckled to himself. “Well, well. This ought to be good.” 


	2. Chapter 2

Case 0080724. Samuel Ortez. Incident occurred in an abandoned building on the West End, March 9th, 2008. Statement given July 24th, 2008. Committed to tape August 5th, 2008. Gertrude Robinson recording.

It feels pretty weird doing this. I mean, I don't believe in ghosts, I never have. That's the sort of belief that tends to keep people out of the army, you know? I only served for two years, and you couldn't pay me to go back, but that's besides the point. After I left, I decided to pursue a degree, and I wanted to study abroad because America is just terrible, and I just sort of.. stayed after I finished it. Could never bring myself to go home.

It has nothing to do with my parents, don't get me wrong, they're lovely. I guess I was just always worried they might be... disappointed that I left the army.

Which is dumb, right? I'm really smart and I'm doing well enough for myself over here, and they never really approved of me joining up anyway, but... I don't know. I'm their only kid, and I really always just wanted to make them proud. But the trauma and the reality of it all kind of hit me like a bus halfway through, and I was on the next flight to England less than a month later.

Apparently it worked out really well, obviously, because I got accepted to Harvard, but the PTSD kind of just.. followed me all through that time. W-well, of course it did, that's how it works, and I got treatment and therapy and all that, but.. it's weird. Every time I thought I was doing well - and I was, is the thing, I had loads of friends and I was really popular - it would just hit me again how I'll never be good for anything except the kind of combat they had trained me for. I could only keep it off my mind for so long before I caved in to the impulse.

I called up an old buddy of mine, who was a firearms dealer, went by the name of Felix. Yes, it was totally illegal, but I wouldn't go looking for him. He's dead now. We met through a friend of a friend sort of thing. He and I were both antsy to get a gun back in our hands, and while I know his reasons were so fundamentally different than mine, it honestly mattered way less to me at the time than it probably should have. I didn't ask where he got the guns, and he didn't ask me what I wanted them for.

I never really used them much. When I got paranoid, I would just go take it out of the safe and hold it, maybe keep it in my lap while I read a book or watched TV or something. It made me feel so much safer than circulating my house seventy times to make sure every door and window was locked. Not that I would have actually shot anybody trying to break in, there are much better ways of dealing with all that, but I just felt.. secure. I felt more like myself, in some ways. I know that sounds crazy, like I'm just another gun-toting, bible-thumping American, but.. it's all I can say.

When that wasn't enough, I allowed myself to have little.. patrols. I got a handgun from Felix that I could hide on the inside lining of a jacket, and every now and then, I would go outside and walk the perimeter of my house once or twice to ensure nothing was there. I started to do it every day at some point. The routine was nice, but it quickly became less and less reassuring. One day, I started adding a lap around the neighborhood to my patrols, then two, then three.

Eventually, I convinced myself that it would be okay to take a trip around town, and when I got back home, I felt so weird and guilty for potentially causing danger that I knew I needed a different outlet for this. My therapist didn't know about any of it, and I was sure it was too late to bring it up now.

I'm not really sure how the vigilante work got started. We just kind of settled into it one day. Every few days, he would call me up with an address and a time, and I would show up, and he'd give me a tidy bit of money. Got to the point where I quit my day job. Word got around, and we started picking up jobs from actual clients. I don't think I can divulge the specific nature of how bad it got without putting myself in danger, but I'm sure you can figure out the rest.

We got a job to clear out an abandoned building. I can't tell you the exact address, you understand. It was owned by a business rival of the person who hired us and we were supposed to find out if there was anything we could find to help them out; leads, blackmail, anything. It wasn't too weird of a job. It certainly wasn't what we were used to dealing with, but none of the actual work was out of our area of expertise, so I didn't really think about it too hard.

When we got inside the building, it was even more dilapidated than we'd been led to believe.  There was rubble all around, all the remaining furniture was completely smashed, and we had to practically destroy the file cabinets we found to get at what was inside. Again, it was nothing we couldn't handle, but something about it made me uneasy. I know I've always been a bit paranoid, but I kept feeling like something was going to jump out at me, guns blazing.

I heard a loud bang at one point, and assumed it was Felix shoving something big out of his way, but when I turned to look, he was still right behind me. It freaked me out, but I dismissed it as just a hallucination or something. Felix had this habit of being really mean about my mental health issues and I knew he wouldn't understand if I said something, so I just let it go. But then there were more. There was something that almost sounded like an explosion, and then... something.. happened to me.

It was like one moment, I was standing in a dark, abandoned building, picking through broken pieces of metal and glass, and the next, I was surrounded by gunfire with fatigues on a shotgun in my arms. And let me be very clear - this was not a flashback. I had never seen any of the people around me before. There was screaming and another sound like an explosion, and the whole ground shook.

I wanted to run, but I couldn't move. I just looked around me and watched as my fellow soldiers scrambled to get away, or to fight, their faces stricken with terror. Suddenly, my legs began walking, but it was not because of my own action. I went outside, calmly raised the barrel of my gun, and fired. Everyone in the blast went down silently, instantly falling to the floor as though they had never been animated in the first place. No one reacted. They all continued running, trampling over the corpses in the middle of the street. Their faces were frozen, as they so often are in death, unblinking eyes watching as I continued my massacre.

I fired again, and again, and again, until there was no one left to scream. Finally at a strange, terrible sort of peace, I returned to the building and picked up a knife off the table. Unable to stop the movements of my arms, I turned the point towards myself, and cut two perpendicular lines right across the center of my face. It hurt more than any bullet or flesh wound ever has, but I couldn’t even scream as my vision went out from the blood. 

When I came to, Felix was shaking my shoulders and yelling in my face. He just rolled his eyes when I told him what happened and said that there had been rumors of the building being haunted, but he didn't think to mention it to me because he didn't think it carried water.

I guess I can't really blame him for that one. Even if he had said something, I probably would have brushed it off too. But I still relive that deep dread of my body being under someone else's control sometimes.

Final comments: it is very infrequent that someone comes into contact with an area so heavily dominated by the Slaughter and emerges physically unscathed. Mr. Ortez is very, very lucky. Without full names, I cannot fact check this, but I suspect that this 'Felix' character is the same one who came up in statements 0051203 and 0070617. It would seem that the Web's people are finding new ways to entertain themselves.

Should I be able to get back in touch with Mr. Ortez, he could possibly be persuaded to give up information about Felix's true identity, but I find it unlikely, seeing as there is no guarantee he will even be residing in England much longer. Although, I suppose it couldn't hurt.

* * *

“Hi, um, I have an appointment?”

“Oh, certainly! What’s the name?”

“Sam Ortez.” 

Jon barely parsed this as Rosie gave him the waivers to sign. Gertrude didn’t often make a habit of asking her assistants to perform follow-up interviews at the actual Institute, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He just happened to be standing there, perusing some files for the statement he was researching, when a familiar voice made itself known.

“Um. I’m here to see Gerard Keay?”

Gerry stood up and grinned at Sam, shaking his hand. “Hey! I’m guessing you’re Sam?”

He nodded, acting as though he was almost afraid of breaking Gerry’s fingers. “Thank you very much for coming. We’ve just got a few follow-up questions on your previous statement. Would you mind terribly if one of our research assistants comes along, takes a few notes?”

Panic briefly flashed in Sam’s eyes, but he said, “N-no, not at all.”

Over his shoulder, Gerry beckoned Jon to follow him, before leading him off into a more private room. Supposedly, it was for the rare occasions such as this, but in practice, Gerry and Elias used it to get high on their lunch breaks and, every now and then, fuck.

Sam sat down in a chair with its back to the door, something he’d never have done of his own accord, and stared tensely at Gerry. His knuckles were white and his face dripped with sweat. “You know, um, I’m actually feeling a little under the weather,” he said all on one breath, picking up his coat and attempting to shuck it back on as quickly as possible. “Maybe, uh, maybe we can reschedule? And I’ll just come back another time when--” 

He’d been backing away, attempting to make it through the door as casually as possible, but he bumped into another figure who’d been standing just outside. He turned over his shoulder, already starting to apologize, but froze when he recognized the face he saw.

Sam was worse for wear, unshaven, with hair disheveled, and with two long bandages that looked like they needed changing covering up the entire middle of his face, but it was definitely him.

“Locus,” Jon sputtered.

“ _ Jon? _ ” Sam said incredulously. 

“Oh,” Gerry called out unhelpfully. “You know each other.” 


End file.
